Memetic Brand

I just flipped through these slides by David Weekly and found myself reflecting on the budding ChangeCamp movement and why the “ChangeCamp-in-a-box” concept is so vital …

Here is a real quote from a Canadian SVP with a brand that you know … “We are not adopting social media and if we were, that decision would be made in the U.S.”  Remarkably this comment was made in an email on an introduction thread initiated by an influential who is well connected to journalists.

What insights does this contain?

The SVP has no fear that the comment will reflect their lack of initiative, their knowledge, their lack of responsibility for the Canadian market - they perceive no threat.  Even if they think social media doesn’t matter and/or are sick of getting too many introductions to talk about social media … why put a comment like this in an easy to spread email to a hack & an entrepreneur who are both bloggers?

Perhaps some demographics at work in Canada that heighten the new digital divide?  Clearly there are very tightly bound social networks in pockets across Canada that make this guy feel safe and can stifle innovation. Even at this moment I am protecting the identity of this dude.  I would never steer an email into the wild or leak something.  That is how I roll, but I don’t think this exec is relying on my ethics.

Does the recession have something to do with it?   Americans’ more pronounced recession is forcing them to take risks with social media and they are finding that it is cost effective?  I don’t think so.

Does this reflect culture?  We are spending billions to cope with the recession & the most imagination that we can show is digging ditches building “infrastructure” & spending $1.4 million per job to save GM.

I agree with Andrew Jenkins - Social media is being completely integrated into marketing.  Marketing is being completely re-architected because of social media.

Brian Moffat’s comment is on to something when he says corporate social media needs to be removed from the hands of marketers in Canada.  I think that will depend on how we sell social media.

Global leaders are adopting Enterprise 2.0 right now.

Gov 2.0 is happening.

Predictions Markets are being put to work.

But Mark is right - Canadians welding power at the moment both corporately and in government are not leading or even fast following.

Our SVP working for a big American brand is not really the problem.  95% of the Canadian economy is driven by small business that has difficulty adopting to radical change like we have witnessed since broadband over took slower connections in 2004. That is the bigger issue.

How about a government tax break aimed at helping these businesses adapt and scale to the global opportunity instead of encouraging me to use my own money to paint my house?

UPDATE, Mar 2010 - This idea could easily be applied across Canada. I trust that readers can envision the edits that would be required below to adjust.

UPDATE, Nov. 19, 2009:  It seems that something like the idea below is being tested in an executive program at Singularity University in Silicon Valley.  Crowdcast points out that there are fundamental flaws with an idea market but it seems that they go on to explain how a prediction market may work for the application that I have described below.

UPDATE 2, Jan. 2, 2010: Was just introduced to Jed Christiansen’s Mercury Blog on prediction markets and innovation and found his simple introductory video.  I would love to have Jed’s comments on the post below.

Original Post:

Quite a while back I wrote a couple of posts over at www.socialcapitalvalueadd.com that provided some observations on the dangers of tightly knit social networks in Ontario’s business community and a request to the Ontario Government to focus any investment to bail out the troubled venture capital industry in this province on building global connections.

A year later the meat of these posts became a cocktail conversation at NetChange Week at MaRs.  The cultural irony in the air was noteworthy, having boot strapping social entrepreneurs gathered, talking about self starting, market driven enterprise while a concentration of Canadian establishment digital media execs and politicians were assembled in Stratford “defining Canada’s digital future” with a $10-million cheque, a declaration and the idea of a government led national digital media action plan.

Is it safe to say at this point that Ontario needs a change in culture to continue to enjoy the privileged position it has held in Canada and globally?  I think so.  There is a lot of quality conversation (like Research Capital’s effort & the exchange at StartUpNorth) and some money being thrown at the problem (by the Ontario & Federal Governments).

That cocktail conversation led to an email exchange that I have been meaning to dump into a blog post all summer.  I hope that you put this into the mix of quality conversation.  Perhaps if it drums up some interest, we can evolve the thoughts here from a rough set of cut and pastes into a viable plan?

While we think we suffer unique hardship in Ontario, with power and money being concentrated in Toronto and Ottawa, while innovation is often highly distributed at the edges - disconnected from power, money & each other - it occurs to me that this is a well recognized pattern once you understand social networks.  Innovation - a new combination of information, insight & resources - often takes place when weak ties bring together the previously unassociated.  So we need solutions designed to improve these loose connections, not reinforce the status quo.

If you talk to local angel organisations you will learn that they are seeing more then 200 seed stage companies a year.  About 25 are getting funded at this stage.

VCs say that they need at least 50 quality deals to get through initial start up to have a funnel of activity that will produce enough home runs to float the domestic industry.

Both VCs & angels will tell you that one of the problems in Ontario is that they are not seeing enough quality deals.

Seed stage companies are full of risk.  So far Ontario doesn’t seem to have a Yossi Vardi who can successfully invest in 50 to 80 hungry entrepreneurs that he can believe in.

Most agree that companies that survive and thrive do so because of the PEOPLE!  I can not believe that there are not 40 or 50 promising people to back in business in Ontario each year.  Once you get going with a business relationship among good people, you might change the business model, you might change key players, go after different customers, etc but you are way more likely to come out with a growing business then if you take this crazy view that quality deals are divined by Angels. That is sort of the point.  World class Angels & VCs work with great people through the good, the bad and the ugly and still come up with a return on investment that keeps institutional investors coming back to the table.

So can we agree that Ontario would be much further ahead on the innovation file if we were seeding great business people?  So the question is … how do we seed 40 to 50 promising startups in Ontario every year? (i.e. funding under $500K).

Some thoughts to steer around (or through) …

- we don’t need to start something like MaRs that is GREAT, but money is needed in startups not institutions,
- we don’t want to give money to the same people (i.e. Ontario VCs, Ontario bankers) to solve this problem, they have their own problems to solve, pre-revenue startups are not an ideal focus for them and besides … startups are going to save Canada’s Venture Capital industry.
- we don’t want to put any team of experts (more people to pay instead of funding start ups), a bureaucracy or government in the position of trying to pick winners from losers in the start up world, too risky, too slow, too much same old “who you know” thing in Ontario.

So how about setting up a prediction market to select the companies that will get seeded?

I am told that if you are going to sit down with government, you should have some sort of ask in mind.

My ask would be this -

Use some dough out of the Ontario Venture Capital Fund and the Emerging Technologies Fund (since hardly any of this money has hit the street yet) or find new money to set up an Ontario Seedling Prediction Market.  Get Ontario VCs to partially fund or make some sort of commitment to this initiative since this is helping solve the quality deal flow problem that they complain about. Make the Prediction Market open and global but the companies vying on the market must be Ontario based.

Set up a standard corporate structure so that these seedlings are ready to scale and (if their promise warrants) take on a $10-million B round (keep founders in, but be big enough and compete with US early stage venture companies).

Get commitments from government and globally based investors (to bring competition and connections for later rounds) to provide the $20-million a year needed to seed 40 companies.

A couple of other upsides from a prediction market approach that come to mind …

a) A prediction market would orient seed companies toward a global market rather than a local closed network.  We all know how the Bell Fund, the NRC programs and other government programs (ACOA comes to mind) skew companies away from global business focus and turn their attention towards the special “screening”, applications and procedures required to win government favour.  Look out!  Here come a bunch of new consultants that local capital ends up paying to get their companies through the hoops (money that should be going into start ups!).  The relationships required to get funding from an Ontario government program are not aligned with the attention & relationships required to make it through a globally competitive B round (i.e. around $10-million).

b) A prediction market positions the Ontario government to champion the cause of early stage companies with global investors in an consistent, long term, sustainable way.  If the Ontario government hires a bunch of “experts” to pick winners (i.e. the typical role of partners in a VC firm or Angels or managers of a pension fund) they become accountable for the picks.  They will get evaluated based upon the performance of these investments.  Just ask local VCs and Angels how difficult it is to achieve positive returns by picking winners.  Have any of them achieved this yet?  The success of a prediction market would be a function of the kind of attention & engagement that it obtained from global, diverse markets.  The Ontario government could lead targeted programs designed to capture the attention of investors in Silicon Valley, New York, Boston, Hong Kong, Singapore, London, etc … all based upon the premise that obtaining the attention of these investors makes the prediction market function better and showcases Ontario innovation rather than a limited portfolio of companies caught in time by the rear view mirror of a few connected locals.

Here’s a pretty good FAQ from an open prediction market platform called Inkling: http://inklingmarkets.com/homes/faq

Here is a NYT article about Crowdcast another start up in the prediction market space:  http://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/06/25/start-ups-software-crowdsources-company-forecasts/ Google, HP, Warner Bros., GM and companies in media and pharma all trying out some variation of prediction markets.

In Ontario we really need government to take a lead on something like this because most of our companies are too small to take advantage of these new abilities to tap into emergence and make better decisions on innovation.

GE & Motorola use Consensus Point Software to manage internal prediction markets …

http://www.consensuspoint.com/prediction-markets-blog/

Take a look at The Industry Standard’s prediction market …

http://www.thestandard.com/predictions

Another thought to keep in mind, domestically, encouraging companies across the province to list on the prediction market would create broad awareness of government leadership on the innovation file and awaken Ontario companies to the need to oriented towards globally competitive innovation.  The prediction market would create a cross promotional effect (with no crazy spends on wasteful the kinds of broadcast advertising often use to raise awareness of government efforts).  As companies oriented themselves towards it, work towards announcing key customers, great products, highlighting great teams, all of their activities would demonstrate to their peers in Ontario what it takes to hatch globally competitive innovation.

A prediction market would cross industries better then common place business plan competitions and pitch  forums for start ups.

As some of you know, I have some recent experience with this.  My Social Capital Value Add method of linking social media to corporate value was a finalist among over 320 entries from 48 countries in a business plan contest held at the University of Miami by WeMedia in February. (part shameless plug, but this experience definitely pushed me beyond the idea of “democratizing” into learning more about prediction markets which deal with unequal distribution of information better).

Offering prize money only works when you are damn sure the kind of innovation that you want to incent.  For example, you could not spur innovation in cleantech and Web 2.0 with the same prize, although once you put a structure in place you could duplicate it in various areas of interest.

Most importantly, while prize money would crowd source desirable innovation, unlike a prediction market, it would not achieve the most important provincial goals which are to wake up all Ontarians to the need for an economy led by globally competitive innovation nor would it orient domestic companies towards global markets instead of a local prize while giving the Ontario government something that they can confidently promote to forge links with foreign markets that are critical to commercialization, marketing success and next rounds of finance.

By the way, a prediction market would not get in the way of Angels or VCs boot strapping early stage seed financing in Ontario.  They would be free to go after the same deals, co-invest, etc.  We agree that there are more then 20 or so quality groups of hungry, crazy people to invest in.  The current ETF approach makes the government a follow on investor, essentially giving this money to existing early stage (not seed) investors, relieving them of the responsibility of earning returns that attract institutional investors.  It is relief to existing early stage investors not start ups.

Feel free to read more about prediction markets:

IDC and The Industry Standard Announce Strategic Prediction Market Partnership

http://www.overcomingbias.com/2009/09/prediction-markets-as-collective-inteligence.html

The Farmetrics(R) Prediction Market https://www.farmetrics.com/

http://mashable.com/2009/08/31/pretweeting/

Did Intrade Predict the Resignation of "Green Jobs Czar" Van Jones?

http://www.daily-chuck.com/2009/09/did-intrade-predict-resignation-of.html

http://www.consensuspoint.com/resources/academic-research/Harvard_Consensus_Point_Prediction_Markets.pdf

Doesn’t it happen to you?  Once in a while, you have the best of intentions about dealing with all of those things on your B-list of priorities and then along comes a blog post or a link to an article that hijacks your entire morning because it contains deep context for you.

Is that how we experience information cascades?

Here is a post by Miro Slodki that hijacked my morning.  The links to research alone make his post a great book mark.

You will understand a lot more about how cascades work after reading it.

Check it out here.

This TED talk by Diane Benscoter leaves open a lot more questions then it answers IMHO but I feel that is has a place in this blog.

I have a lot more to learn about how we can head off, deconstruct or destroy unwanted memes.  How to prevent the idea of “going postal” from spreading?  How do we neutralize the idea of replicating a shooting spree?

If you have links to papers or blog posts about neutralizing viral ideas I would appreciate it if you would share them.

After you watch the video, I recommend that you scan the comments over on the TED site. Could this be described as a memetic battle line?

In a review of Tara Hunt’s new book, The Whuffie Factor, over at Social Capital Value Add I said, “I think that the terms “Whuffie” and “Social Capital Value Add” each have memetic qualities because they both come from fertile idea habitats”.

I also inserted a link to a Fast Company article by Clive Thomson that is another attempt to explain the research work of Duncan Watts.  It falls into a bit of a pop broadcast media trap by polarizing Watts findings versus Malcom Gladwell’s Tipping Point.

I don’t think that Watts & Gladwell (or the many great researchers that they are spokes people for) are polar opposites.  Like Burt’s Structural Holes & Granovetter’s Strength of Weak Ties and if I may, the concepts of brand & Social Capital Value Add … all these ideas are complimentary in my view.  They describe different aspects of interrelated networks.  I recommend reading Clive’s article. Particularly if you have a boss that wants you to go out and spend all of your time trying to schmooze influencers on the internet.

At the moment I know that Whuffie has a much better chance of surviving than Social Capital Value Add. I know this for four reasons.

Firstly, Whuffie is a term that lives in a rich idea habitat.  Tara has deftly picked up (with permission) the “ephemeral, reputation-based currency of Cory Doctorow’s science fiction novel, Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom.  Cory already delivered Whuffie in the context of the “conversation” that has been propigated by the Cluetrain manifesto set.  Tara has given the term new social currency with all of the context of real world business examples and her personal story.

Secondly, Tara’s work itself is evidence that Whuffie is a term that has variance and can replicate, both key elements for memetic survival.  Variation is the key to natural selection and people (not t.v. ads, or billboards) are the most critical points of replication.  Cory set up Whuffie to replicate easily by being the first to release his novel for free over the Internet.

For different clusters in our social networks, i.e. investors and senior managers tuned to value based management, brand valuation and Economic Value Added, Social Capital Value Add is set up in these same ways.

It has been released in free e-book form.  It has had some success in being replicated in much appreciated blog posts and through ChangeThis, but I recognize that I am trying to resonate with networks that I do not have deep personal connections.  A cross-disciplinary solution is required.  It really takes collective input from a variety of experts to give this term life.

For more on Idea Habitats please grab the ebook and check the “Exertion of Influence” section from page 18 to 25.  There you find my attempt to dig into these concepts a bit more, for example through Fig. 6 from the ebook below:

Please click on this link & wiegh in.

Richard Florida, Roger Martin & Barry Wellman all have an opinion, I would like you to express yours!

UPDATE: five to six hours later …

So I weaved conformity & nonconformity, MySpace, Twitter & Facebook culture, innovation & creativity, the struggling artist/entrepreneur, Richard Florida & Roger Martin’s prescription for the Ontario economy & Barry Wellman’s thesis of networked individualism into one post http://bit.ly/utM1.

I had hoped it was a social media experience.  As in, are you experienced? This music should really be playing in the background while you review this.  Memetic Brand blog readers won’t be really entertained until they have the Hendrix, the MySpace blog post, the Florida post & and Wellman paper all open at the same time .

Some pretty interesting results.

It looks like I lost 30 followers immediately upon posting the question to twitter.

Qwitter reports that this tweet two hours before the time of notifications is the tweet that lost them. But the time of posting the question, “Should I Change My Avatar” with a link to the post & the time of receipt from emails from Qwitter are almost the same.  Has anyone else noticed Qwitter is not accurate?

It was a shameful question to ask or folks are just fed up my drivel.  Either way, obviously a notable breach of culture.

The link in the twitter post received quite a bit of attention, http://bit.ly/info/utM1.  Over 60 clicks.  So a lot more people read the post than qwit.

Both the readers & qwitters are about half from Canada & the United States.  Dunno if you can make a cultural observation from this?

Thanks to a few friends who played the game and spoke up on the side of reason.

I have changed my avatar.

Does this tell you more or less about me?

I can’t tell the difference.  Can you tell the difference?

(Forget for a moment that the former avatar was crafted 111 years ago, in another medium, for a different application

In any event, I do hope that this has been an interesting experience in social media.

I hope that we can all relate to each other better now.

Clearly I should have done this a long time ago.

Would the University of Toronto grad student who sparked this post by Rich Webster, which led to this post by John Gaynard please get in touch with me.  Perhaps you would like to write a guest post here.

Rich & John … we would like to welcome your guest posts here as well.

I have also posted this with some comments over at www.socialcapitalvalueadd.com because it is a great discussion of how network thinking is emerging as a dominant form in the 21st century.

From about the 3:38 point in the video to 7:30 Barabási and Fowler have a focused discussion on the differences between social & tech networks and the role of natural selection in the formation & structure of social networks.

These are four highly recommended minutes for anyone working towards the understanding of memetic brand.

Hat tip to Valdis Krebs for sharing this item and these related links:

The genes in your congeniality:  Researchers identify genetic influence in social networks.

The PDF of the full paper.

The transcript is here.

I highly recommend heading over to Trendsspotting’s post featuring their series of reports on trends in social media, mobility, online marketing, consumer influencers and IT & tech by many of the biggest online gurus.

You can quick grab the reports from these links too:

1. Social Media Influencers Predictions 2009 By TrendsSpotting [Size : 1.68MB]

2. Influencers On Mobile 2009 -2020 Predictions By Trendsspotting [Size : 881 KB ]

3. Influencers On Online Marketing 2009 By Trendsspotting [Size : 798 KB ]

4. Consumer Influencers 2009 Trends from Trendsspotting [Size : 823 KB ]

5. Influencers On IT & Tech Trends By TrendsSpotting [Size : 1.35 MB ]

As I flip through them, here are the predictions that resonate with me:

1. On Social Media:  Todd Defren at www.pr-squared.com notes “The tipping point has not only not been reached, but could still tilt away from social media.”   Web 2.0 Swan Song? captures the fear that I have expressed along these lines and a call to change how we frame social media’s value proposition.  Back in early November 2008, I did some quick & dirty asking around for a social marketing round table that I led at the Canadian Marketing Association’s Digital Marketing Conference and found that we are clearly very early in the social media adoption curve.  Most of the other predictions evolve out of this point I believe.  Social media has yet to transform the traditional corporation.  Everyone is feeling the info overload of this massive change therefore the “back to basics” and simplification calls (which are no more than wishful thinking).

2. On mobility (by 2020): “Augmented reality will automate recognition of real world objects …”, Jason Stoddard, Managing Director of Centric/Agency of Change.  At PlanetEye, I began to think of the world as having a “media atmosphere”.  I just googled “media atmosphere” with no results that coincide to this idea.  Anywhoo, the eventual effect of mobility and geotagging media is that there will be virtual graffiti everywhere or in other words, media artifacts attached to all physical space … this is another factor elimating the gap between virtual and so-called “real” world.

3. Online Marketing 2009: “the move beyond CPM starts to actually happen, after years of CPA type predictions.  Related, a stunning new metric will emerge that accurately determines the success of media properties beyond mere page views.” Richard MacManus, www.readwriteweb.com Alleluia!  If you think Social Capital Value Add is a possible contenter then help out please!

4. Consumer Trends 2009:  Most of the experts seem to be pointing to the intersection of bad economic times & personal reactions to bad times.  It seems like a sound strategic basis when you consider something like the Lipstick Index.  What occurs to me here is the huge contrast between the quarterly driven “right now” predictions of the advertising “consumer” trend folks versus the others who are focused on catching the value of long term changes in markets.  I.e. sales vs. value creation.  My hat tip here goes to Dr. Taly Weiss, the founder of Trendspotting, not only for pulling together these easy to flip through reports, but for finally making me go and look up what the hell MoSoSo stands for and her great “needs focused” predictions on Slide 10 - worth the visit.

5. IT & Tech Trends:  This is a deeper dive and spans consumer & enterprise tech … so not so easy to come up with the meta-trend, but I will take a shot anyways … the resilence of “green” concern will surprise businesses.  Corporate thinking traditionally would go something like  this … oil is dropping to $40 a barrel or less so when energy prices are no longer a pain in the consumers’ butt, this preoccupation with “green” is going to go away.  Not so this time because “green” is tapped into the now accepted threat of global warming and a broader set of frustrations/expectations/demands for the breakthroughs in productivity that can come across private enterprises & government through broadband enablement (i.e. data portability, social media, semantic web).